Descending without brakes

In the great hall, past the suspended acrobats pouring drinks, inverted on lines, a fisherman impossibly perched with rod and reel twenty-five feet above the floor, past the stage where twenty glee club singers, smiles stretched, arms akimbo in unison, singing all of our Motown favorites, a man sits alone at a table.  Rheumy eyes are set in a large face furrowed with eighty years of life, thin white hair pulled over a white scalp, hands folded expectantly.  An old friend, a new friend and I sit across from him, balancing plates of 'heavy hordoerves,' a beer, an umbrella, and several books.  The open chairs are a relief.  The man welcomes us and we shake hands.

He looked alone, but he introduces his wife as she comes back to the table.  A lovely South Carolinian drawl, dwelling on vowels with lilts in unexpected places.  I strain to latch on to phrases eddying in the torrents of awful music and crowd noise.  "School of business... Korea... Charette..."  I nod understandingly and admire my friend's listening skills, but then suspect she's doing the same thing I am. 

How much of a sentence do we need to hear to understand an idea?  It must be thirty percent.  The old man carried us on a conversation about the Vendee counter-revolution in post revolution France, to the intricasies of negotiating contracts with Chinese schools, to the civil war and back to his family's history in South Carolina.  He spoke of his great grandfather's desertion before Appotomax, keeping his rifle from Lee's army.  He laughed and listened and his eyes drank us in. 

We are seldom what we seem.  Our bodies change and grow old around us; our lives become a confabulation of dates, times and duties, our minds create a web of connections, inferences and calculations, worries and fears, loves and hopes.  Our one saving grace is the ability to let ourselves become connected to someone else.  A brilliant, brief, accidental connection with an old man at a table in a crowded hall left me wondering for the walk home through the Vancouver rain.